New and noteworthy

Recently, I read a post on Facebook from a healer who was speaking of clients being brought to tears through her work. I have seen a desire among certain healers to be validated through the emotional releases of their clients. In my early days, I myself took is as some kind of achievement if my client had a huge, dramatic release on my table.

But as time went by, I started to question this for several reasons. One was the whole concept of ‘re-traumatization’ that I first read about in Peter Levine’s book Waking the Tiger. There is quite a bit of evidence that some emotional recapitulations of trauma actually reinforce what I call the ‘scar wiring’ of PTSD. I’ve learned that sometimes an emotional release can happen within a context that results in the client being worse off than they were. I’ve also learned that sometimes these releases take place in a context that catalyzes a positive quantum jump in their healing journey. And I’ve learned that sometimes the release represents a temporary catharsis that, while appearing profound, actually seems to engender no lasting change; it is ephemeral and wanes over time.​The point is, there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about having a huge emotional reaction. As in so many things, it is the context that matters. I've had clients who themselves have measured a session's efficacy by how dramatic the ‘ride’ is. It’s almost as if the healing work we’re doing has an element of entertainment. I do not keep these clients - they either leave of their own accord, or in one or two cases where it was clear to me that we were treading water, I’ve asked to stop working with them.

A lot of deep healing takes place with no tears. I remember hours of standing Taoist ‘Clearing Down’ meditation, wherein I felt waves of regret, loss, rage, grief, terror, anxiety, arrogance, and self-righteousness pass through me. it was (and still is) remarkable to me that merely standing in a specific posture and working on a specific set of sensation/release instructions could let such long-held, heretofore repressed emotions rise to the surface, unleashed with often astounding ferocity. But I didn’t cry, or yell, or gesticulate, I practiced releasing the emotions as they arose, letting them go. And that is harder than one might expect, because I didn’t want to let them go. There was a real, palpable fear to letting them go.

Why, I asked my teacher, would I want to hold onto these things? Trauma is one of the ways we know ourselves to be who we are, he replied. The body collects and collates its emotional and physical scars as a survival mechanism: you learn from what harms but does not kill you, so it’s understandable that you don’t want to forget it. But as Levine and others have pointed out, we humans, with our time sense, our ability to stray from ‘being present’, derived from our well-developed pre-frontal cortex, can’t seem to discharge the emotional content of the lesson the way animals seem to (though, of course, we know that repeatedly abused animals also display PTSD behaviors, so even they can be ‘scar wired’ as I call it). We can’t let go of the emotions because our systems mistakenly link them to the experience as a unitary, indivisable whole. Therefore, we’re afraid of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In my teacher’s Taoist framework, every trauma is bound up into a knot of Qi (life force energy, pronounced “Chi”, also called Prana). This knot of Qi weakens the system and disrupts energy flow. By releasing the emotions woven into the trauma, we actually untie the knot and liberate this bound up Qi to be utilizable by our organism for health and vitality.​This is where various modalities, from the Clearing Down meditation to EMDR come in - through them, we can retain the experience and the memory, but let go of much of the limbic charge - we can alter that wiring and at the same time, liberate that bound-together Qi. And these processes can be very undramatic at times, yet quite efficacious.

But I would be the first to admit that I have also seen a long-term healing effect, one that transcends temporary catharsis, in some sessions where there was yelling, crying and screaming so loud that I was very, very glad that I give sessions on my own property now, and no longer in an office building. Here is one of them:

I had a client, whom I’ll call Mary. She’s in her 50’s, and has suffered several severely abusive relationships. She’s also experienced a lot of ‘idiopathic’ (doctor-speak for ‘We have no idea.’) respiratory problems, which have included collapsed lungs. her breathing has been an important concern to her for her entire life. When I first met her, my Guidance told me that she had been sexually abused at a young age. I didn’t mention what I saw to her because in general, I don’t like to ‘lead’ my clients, or, God(dess) forbid, ‘implant’ memories into them through suggestion. So, I kept it to myself. We worked together for quite a few months, and then one day, while I was primarily doing an AuraLuminance session with her, I found a gnarled, nasty ’tree’ of energy growing out of the side of her aura, just below and to the left of her heart, right out of her ribcage. It’s hard to describe how I ‘saw’ or ‘knew’ or ‘felt’ this, because there are some elements of all three of those verbs in what I was perceiving, but they are neither accurate nor adequate.

At any rate, I proceeded to ‘pull out’ this ’tree’ from her. It took all of my physical strength, working in her aura, and as I pulled it away, I could feel the energetic ‘roots’ sliding out of her body. Finally, at the precise second that the last ‘root’ popped out of her and I pulled this gnarled, energetically crooked, bound thing away, she started screaming at the top of her lungs. Screaming, swaying, weeping, sobbing, gasping for breath, and then screaming some more. I let this go on for while, and then the pattern started ramping up - I could see that a sort of feedback loop was instantiating. The release of a long-suppressed trauma was cycling back into the trauma experience and back out again in a closed loop. I went to her feet and grounded her, pulled the energy out, through her feet, through me, and into Mother Earth (she recycles everything!). Gradually, Mary calmed, and the physical manifestations of her trauma response, from rigidity to gasping, eased, and she was left limp on the table.

But what had been accomplished? Mary told me that in the very second I’d pulled that tree out, the very second she’d screamed, she’d gotten back memories of being held down and sexually assaulted as a toddler by a family employee. We had never spoken a word of this, or even of the chance of childhood sexual abuse. Rather, this ‘knot’ of Qi, once liberated, unbound the memory tied up inside it, and it could now be consciously ascertained, and, with some more work, processed.

The most interesting aspect of this case came a day or two later, when we spoke by phone. I asked how she was doing, and she remarked that she was breathing better than she had in years. Quite unexpectedly, it was my turn to cry, as my guidance told me that her life-long lung problems had stemmed from the stifled screams of a terrified toddler that had been waiting for decades to find a way out into the Light to be healed. I think it’s fair to say that this experience has changed Mary, and for the better. She continues to become more resilient, more trusting of herself, more connected to Spirit.

Other times, clients and I have quite successfully revealed and released traumas without any tears. But either way, we’ve often created a new relationship of the client to self that is replete with genuine empathy and acceptance.

In a way, a ‘need’ for a kind of drama that some clients (and some practitioners) have is akin to the ‘need’ some have for deep tissue work; they truly feel that only the most painful therapies can yield release and transformation. I know: I used to be one of those people. I was numb from my spinal cord damage, and I fervently believed that I had to feel pain to release pain. This belief probably owes a lot to our “No Pain, No Gain” Calvinist roots. Although there are myriad examples in nature of gain without pain, we humans seem to believe that there’s a zero-sum game being played out there, and within, and that you always must suffer to succeed.

This is why Ortho-Bionomy is often such a counter-intuitive revelation to people, as it most often painless, almost never, ever truly painful, and yet it can engender such radical and deep change. After having experienced the typical physical therapy Psoas muscle release on many occasions, which is quite exquisitely painful, the totally painless but equally effective Psoas releases achieved through Ortho-Bionomy were hard to for me to accept. Some part of me wanted the pain because it believed that it was necessary. What a relief that I’ve gotten over that!

This process also applies to Ortho-Bionomy self-care. But more to the point, I am speaking to the fundamentals of what it means to be human: as I age, my “push through it all no matter what the pain” philosophy has been tempered by the realization that I must be more gentle with myself at times. I must be aware of my limitations, and, yes, push the envelope at times, but at other times I must discern when it’s time to step back and nurture myself with gentle care. A lot of my practice involves working with clients to engender this same love of self, empathy for self, which, it appears, is one of those things we find hardest to accomplish. We look to others for love, and we often find it much easier to nurture and comfort others, rather than ourselves (except for ‘negative comforts’ - self-numbing strategies from sex to food to drugs, which masquerade as nurturance but are really its opposite).

So, whether you or your practitioner, or you or your client cry and have a huge dramatic release or not is not the question. The question is, always is: at this moment, what techniques, modalities, insights, energetic, physical and spiritual adjustments, and releases and behavioral alterations, can we use to engender evolution towards being more loving, more lovable, more sanguine, more contented, more creative, more generous, more moral and ethical, more magnanimous, more unreflexive and non-defensive human beings?

This process never ends, for you, for me - for that is what it means to be human, in the best sense of the word.

Here's an excerpt from my upcoming memoir, Walking Through Snow, about my journey back from Quadriplegia, Brain Damage, and PTSD. The moral of the story? Never give up!

P.S. There's a FREE download of a song about this experience at the bottom of this entry!

Pain is the road back

So there I was, in the Neuro Intensive Care Unit, awake at 3AM. Just another long scary night like all of the others; the monitors screaming, signaling my imminent death every time I did manage to duck the feeling of electrocution long enough to drift off into a morphine sleep of shallow breaths and dreams of running, threading needles gleefully, of feats of athleticism and coordination. Another psychotic fear-filled night full of alarms, and murmurs from Robert, the comatose ex-cop somewhere near my head. Another night of seizures, alarms, and close-calls for Adnan in the bed somewhere near my feet.

This night, the pain was really bad, and Cleve and the other staff had been just too busy to get to me. Not that there was that much they could do, but at least they could turn me over and stretch me, and change my smelly diaper. And then of course, there was Morphine, which couldn’t kill the pain, but could sort of distract me from it into those exultant denial dreams of playing sports and guitar.

My arms were stiff blocks of burning wood. I was repeatedly convulsing in a feedback loop of vicious clonus(1) spasms. I was sweating from the convulsions, exhausted, and feverish too. I felt that my whole body below my neck was a mass of smoking, burning, crackling, arcing wires, all plugged right into my brain’s pain center. The new pain in my foot was starting to compete malignantly for my attention, another unbearable burden to bear. If I’d been sane, I’d have marveled at the body’s sheer unexcelled power to produce pain. But I was buried within it, not intellectualizing about it. The exhausted staff seemed nowhere to be found. There were no crises, no emergencies now, and it was almost dead quiet, just the subdued howl of my monitor whenever I breathed too shallowly. Just the chirps and beeps of the alarms of the others around me, as they also danced their own little pas de deux with death, advancing, then retreating from his arms.

I guess because no one was around, I finally gave myself permission to cry hard. I mean really, really hard and loud. I felt like one of those soldiers who has been tortured to the point that he’s completely broken, that he’ll do anything, say anything to stop the pain. Up to then I’d largely been joking, superficially confident and almost ‘inspirational’ to my friends – telling them that this accident meant something, and that if it didn’t, I’d make it mean something. And I’d been somewhat stoic when alone, always hoping for things to ‘ease off’. When I did cry, it was quietly, discretely, kind of a controlled little letting off of steam. But now, my defenses were down, the pain had cut through all hope and the abandoned ward gave me some license. I started weeping powerfully and praying for death.I found I couldn’t stop. A howling wail arose from somewhere and it took me awhile to register that the sound was coming from within me. It seemed that my whole body was weeping, that the clonus was my body’s way of weeping.

I don’t know how long it lasted, but suddenly heard a quiet voice near me. I opened my eyes and saw a very old-looking, gray-haired doctor in a spotless white jacket, leaning over my bed. “Why are you crying?”, he said. I remember thinking “oh boy, here’s Mr. Macho, reproving me for crying”. It reminded me of a time in a park when I was a little boy and skinned my knee. I was crying, inconsolable, when an old man came over to me and said “big boys don’t cry” to me, contempt written all over his face. I’d never forgotten it, and perhaps that’s why it’d taken so long to finally let totally go and cry like a baby. I felt my gorge rise in righteous indignation and defensiveness. “because I can’t stand the pain, because it doesn’t stop, only gets worse!”, I spat back petulantly. “No one else is crying here”, he said quietly, in a soft, measured voice. “Do you know why that is?” Again, I thought he was going to disparage me like that old man in the park for somehow lacking courage. “No!” I shouted “Why?” “Because their wires are all broken. They will never walk again. Some of them will never use their arms again. Some will never breathe without help again. Take that woman over there:” (He pointed off into the darkened unit at someone I couldn’t see) “She’s 22, fell of a barstool drunk, broke her neck. She’ll never move anything below her neck again and will probably be on a ventilator for the rest of her life. If she’s lucky, she’ll get to the point that she can blow into a tube to move her wheelchair around. She keeps saying it’s not true, keeps praying to God for a miracle, but there will be no miracle, no escape for her. You’re the only person crying from pain in this ward.”

“You’re the only one who feels anything at all. And you’re the only person who will ever have a chance of walking, of using his limbs like a normal person again. Your pain shows that your wires, even if they’re crushed, still carry some signals. Those signals are chaos right now – that’s what the pain is – chaos – under-sensitivity, over-sensitivity – everything out of proportion, some sensations numbed to the point of disappearance, others amplified to the point of distortion. But you can push yourself through those wires and reestablish contact and recalibrate the sensitivity. Go into your pain. Use it. Your pain is your way back to the land of the living”, he said. And with that he left.

To this day he has some of the qualities of a hallucination, and I’m not sure he wasn’t; what the hell was an elderly doctor doing in the NICU at 3AM anyway? But I somehow do not think he could be a construct of my mind, because his description of my situation, though absolutely correct, was totally antithetical to any opinions I myself had about my predicament; I don’t think I could have dreamed up his line of reasoning because it was utterly counterintuitive to my own at the time.

So he was either real, or perhaps he was a visitation from an angel, or God. I’ll never know. I only know that he gave me courage, and he did it in the only way that could have worked: he challenged me while acknowledging my pain, validated my suffering and yet imbued the experience with a positive healing connotation. In a complete reversal of my own mind’s sense of natural order, he managed to bathe the darkest coldest most implacable pain I’d ever suffered with an almost divine power to heal. He also washed away a large part of my self-pity, my petulance, and my rage at my predicament with his empathy, understanding and inspiration.

Footnote: (1) Clonus is an instant spasming or rigidifying all or part of the body (in my case, all or part of the parts below my shoulders) Typically, I'll stretch in the middle of the night and my arms will shoot up rigidly into the air, and sometimes my legs will shoot straight out on the bed. It's a symptom of spinal cord damage. It also happens when I yawn: my arms rise up of their own accord and I look like I'm motioning an orchestra to silence. It's scary, of course, because it's involuntary. I actually feel like an umbrella operated by a malevolent (or at least mischievous) god. He slides the umbrella open and the fabric of me becomes taut. Sometimes he opens it partly (my arms only) and sometimes he opens it all the way (arms legs, trunk). He never really closes it all the way, which accounts for the rigidity or 'tone' in may arms and shoulders. The tone is a constant stiffness that makes parts of my arms and hands feel like they're made of wood. Clonus is worse when I'm tired, and (except for yawns or stretches) active mostly at night. However, the first hour or so after waking - especially the first time I stand up in the morning - is full of clonus. I'll have the very scary sensation of my arms and legs becoming rigid as I stand up, which makes me feel that I'm about to topple over.

Listen here by clicking the Play triangle on the player, or right-click 'Download File' and choose​'Save File As', 'Save Target As', or 'Save Link As' ​to save your own copy of the song to your own device.

I treat people with broken bones and with deep-seated emotional trauma, people who are dealing with negative external energies, and people with a single rib that's hurting like crazy. How does that all work as a whole, is there a common denominator? Aren't I working in vastly different areas of human health?

Ortho-Bionomy came out of Osteopathy, and so is deeply grounded in neurophysiology and anatomy. In fact, you have to successfully complete a college-level anatomy and physiology course to get certified as a practitioner in Ortho-Bionomy. But unlike Osteopathy, or Ortho-Bionomy's own immediate predecessor, Strain-Counterstrain, Ortho-Bionomy also deals with pure energetic work, from hands off to remote work. Ortho-Bionomy acknowledges the existence of 'subtle energy' (also called 'Qi', 'Chi', and 'Prana'), and the 'aura', or 'field', as I prefer to call it. It also acknowledges the concept of 'channeling', as the founder of Ortho-Bionomy, Arthur Lincoln Pauls, received a lot of information about how to evolve his creation from channeled information. Because it is quite grounded in Western neuroanatomy, yet also 'aura-aware', Ortho-Bionomy makes a great 'container' or 'companion' practice with other modalities - it plays well with most others, though not with all: Chiropractic is almost the exact opposite of Ortho-Bionomy: a vertebrae is out, the chiropractor moves it back in, which is a very allopathic approach. An Ortho-Bionomist will actually move the vertebrae farther out physically, or merely 'nudge' it farther out energetically, until the body becomes aware of its misalignment and self-corrects, using its own nerves and muscles, in an almost homeopathic 'like treats like' approach. This is why Ortho-Bionomy (or OB for short) is so gentle and non-invasive; because it forces nothing, and moves into the pattern, into comfort.

Aura-Luminance is somewhat different from Ortho-Bionomy, and I say I developed it, but not invented it, because I was born knowing how to do it, and all I've done over the years is extend it and get to know it better. I've been manipulating the human 'field' (aura) since I was a kid. Since I was a small child, I also 'saw' or 'knew' or 'heard' knowledge of disease, and also things like the weight, date and sex of unborn children in their mother's bellies. Often, when I was quite young, women would bring their babies to me in Cobble Hill Park, in Brooklyn, to get me to get them to stop crying. I did it with energetic touch, and also with what I can only call 'untangling' of their field. Although OB also works with the field, the work in AuraLuminance does not always follow the principle of moving into the pattern. Rather, with AuraLuminance I often forcefully yank structures out of the field, and reshape distortions within the field. Though it is compatible with OB, AuraLuminance is something quite different. I have yet to discover if it can or cannot be taught - can people learn to feel the distortions in the human field caused by trauma and external energies that I feel? I am not sure. It is something I will be investigating in the future. Unlike many people, I don't think everyone can be a good medical intuitive with training, or everyone can be a good Ortho-Bionomist, for that matter. Everyone can improve, with hard work, but I do believe that some are still born more talented than others in this field, just as they are in the arts or athletics.

Shamanic Psychology is another kettle of fish altogether. It consists of guided meditations, like the 'time travel' meditation, and also 'question and answer' sessions between myself and my guidance to channel specific information for my clients. How I hate the word 'channel', because it evokes for me some grand poohbah holding forth to all peoples about the fate of the earth. This may be real sometimes, I don't presume to know, but I do know of many 'channelers' who are outright frauds in my opinion. What I do is more personal: I use my body as a pendulum often, to determine various energetic and physical conditions, and then use all the tools in my toolkit to shift and resolve those. But when I do some of the guided meditations, like the 'time travel' meditation, I often channel very specific and meaningful information for my clients, often directly connected to their past. This can be very healing, and very powerful. Does one really 'travel in time'? during these meditations? I won't fill you with a lot of pseudo-science about the quantum universe, the true nature of time, because neither I, nor probably 99% of all the people who bandy about such terms truly understand them. I can only say that it sometimes really seems like we've gone back to address a deep trauma, and sequelae like disassociation, self-harm, depression etc. Maybe we really go back and it 'ripples forward' to the present to help heal the adult client on my table, maybe not. But whatever's 'really' happening, it does seem to move, shift and often deeply heal traumas of abuse, neglect, loss and grief.

I hope to learn and integrate even more techniques, and I also intend to keep studying Ortho-Bionomy until the day I die. It's fascinating, effective, and ever-growing, as is Shamanic Psychology.

So, yes, one could say my practice is schizophrenic, but only if one sees the body, the mind, the soul, the emotions, as all separate. If one sees the body, the soma as a reflection of the soul's work for this incarnation, as well as mirror of the emotions and traumas at play in the psyche, and of course, also a physical vessel, capable of breakage and damage like anything physical, there is no schizophrenia: your sore shoulder may indeed be from a rotator-cuff injury, or from an unwell gall bladder, or even from a severe psychological trauma you experienced, or possibly all three.

I didn't believe this not so long ago (maybe 10 years ago). I had a huge relapse of my symptoms from my paralysis (I was a quadriplegic some 24 years ago for a short time, due to a spinal cord injury). I went to Western doctors, and also tried loads of supplements. I tried all kinds of physical therapy too, for my returning symptoms of pain and paralysis were quite explicitly physical. How amazing that the thing that finally healed these symptoms was EMDR, a therapy devised for PTSD. I had PTSD around my injury, and had never noticed it, or acknowledged it, let alone treated it. But once the traumatic charge in my brain was processed and integrated, these utterly physical symptoms disappeared. People think of 'psycho-somatic' as imagined. I prefer to think of it as physical disease manifested from psychic damage or disruption. There have been amazing cases, like the younjg doctor who hypnotized a boy with a horrific and 'incurable' skin disease, and cured it. (Details here)

There is no realistic distinction between psyche and soma - they are indivisible. That is why I treat the whole person, rather than just the body, and why I see a human being as more than a Newtonian collection of hydraulics, levers, wires and fulcrums.

Lately, I've recommended this exercise to many clients, so many of late, that I've decided to post it here, as it's good for everyone, believe me. We crazy humans... we seem to incarnate into a reality wherein loving others is so much easier than loving ourselves. Our default position is to be devoted to others, often ignoring our own needs, or becoming angered by them, or acceding to them only grudgingly - except for the raging sociopaths and narcissists of the world, but I am not speaking of them.

This grudging regard, sometimes outright disregard or annoyance of one's own needs goes for for me too, often to my dismay. Do I do my Qipong every day? Do I always eat right? Don't I sometimes scold myself mentally, chewing myself out for this or that action, inaction, embarrassment, failing? You bet I do. But I'm trying, as I hope you are, to become gentler with myself. I fully believe that you cannot receive a higher love from another than that you give to and receive from yourself, so it's imperative to practice self-love. Not the preening narcissism so prevalent (and rewarded, alas) in our society, but a gentle, non-verbal, primal re-connection to and appreciation of self.

I've often marveled at how I would touch a lover with more reverence and sweetness than I'd touch myself. Why is that, I'd wonder. Why is it easier for me to be present to their soul, expressed within their body, than to my own? It took someone else, a marvelous therapist in Woodstock, NY named Joseph Trusso, to steer me away from asking the question and to just get into action to change my dynamic with myself. He recommended this exercise to me in general form and, as is my wont, I then tweaked it for myself and my own clients.

So, to begin, this is an exercise, or, really, a practice, that is done with reverence, in a quiet, private setting. Turn off the phone and the radio, find a room to yourself, and some time when you won't be disturbed. It might be good to light a candle first, to make this a ritual, with a real beginning, but I would not light a scented candle, or sage or incense, because I want your senses attuned to you, not to any external fragrance. The same with music: this should be done in silence. This can be seen as a devotional activity: you are the altar in this practice, the connection to God/Goddess/Sun/Heaven/Earth - whatever and however you perceive the Divine.

So, you're in a quiet, private place. Now take off all of your clothes. If you're cold, by all means get under some covers - I want you to feel warm, safe, comfortable, nurtured.

Now, I want you to slowly, reverently, and non-sexually touch your entire body. I want you to slowly, carefully and with your full attention touch every inch of your body - even that spot between your second and third toe - all of it! - and I want you to touch it like this: When one part of you touches another, there are two sets of nerves communicating that touch through your nervous system, the nerves of the part 'doing the touching' and the nerves of the part 'being touched'. Of course, in reality, both are doing the touching, and being touched, but for the purposes of this practice, imagine bringing your hand (either hand) to your forehead. The hand moving to the forehead will be 'doing the touching' and the forehead will be 'being touched'. Got it? Now, when they touch (actually even before they make physical contact), the 'toucher' and the 'touchee' are both sending information up the peripheral nervous system and into the Central Nervous System (CNS). Two streams of position (the proprioceptive nervous system that is the heart of Ortho-Bionomy), muscular contraction/expansion, two pressures from two sets of nerves (deep pressure and tactile surface pressure, which gives us sensations like rough and smooth), temperature, and perhaps other bits of information (I'd add perception of 'Chi' or 'Prana', for example), are all streaming into your CNS. It's a LOT of information, and we rarely focus on it. Far from it: we actively filter a lot of it out, and we often have to - you can't focus on all of that while driving a car or hitting a tennis ball.

But it is an incredible amount of information that we've become numbed to. Ironically, one of the 'gifts' of my paralysis years ago was that, as I relearned to move, I re-gained an intimate relationship with these data flows, as some of them were gone almost entirely (I am still about 50% numb below my shoulders, though the numbness is uneven and non-uniform, and involves deep pressure and tactile sensory nerves differently in different places). I got to re-see the incredible, delicate, complex stream of different sensations that we normally gloss over as we move our bodies without conscious thought. I actually feel less physically - I am really quite numb - but I pay more attention, exquisite attention, because I have to. So, although there's less information coming in, there's more awareness of, processing of, and appreciation of the information that does arrive. Now I am asking you to step into that world, inside your self, with your exquisite body of sense and sensibility.

You can use one hand, you can alternate hands (are the sensations different with the dominant and non-dominant hands?), and, later, after you've done this for a little while I'd encourage you to branch out and touch with other parts of your body as well - legs, feet, arms etc.

I want you to close your eyes, and slowly, softly, sensually-but-not-sexually touch yourself, all over - I mean everywhere! What it is like to touch your genitals non-sexually? Your perineum? What is it like to delicately circumscribe the puckered circle of your anus, the arch of your tailbone, the softness of your eyelids?

And, most importantly: what is it like on both sides of this conversation? Because with each touch, I want you to focus first on the part of your body being touched. Try to isolate just that 'side' of the nervous system conversation for a second. Feel the tactile response, including roughness or smoothness, the energetic response, the pressure, the temperature. Feel the nerves fire along a path as you move or stroke. Then turn your attention to the part doing the touching and focus on it for a second - the single fingertip or fingertips, the palm, the fingernail or nails. This touching need not be static, in fact I'd say try touching without movement first, register it from both sides, and then try stroking and other movement - try it all, as if you are a new born child, just learning that you even have a body, and setting out to explore it with non-judgmental curiosity. And I'd also say a spirit of what I'd call 'reverent play' is important. Try your fingertips, fingernails, maybe the top of your hand, the palm, the soft part of your wrist. Try to ignore the rest of the universe, until you are your universe. Feel each end of the conversation as individually as possible.

Now, you may find parts of your body that you are judgmental about. I've told several of you about the roll of fat around my middle that I'm not too crazy about, about how, when I touch that place, I can still, if I am kind and open and gentle with myself, find things to appreciate about that place. it is nicely curved, sensual even, and warm. I can appreciate how that place loves the palm of my hand, and how the palm of my hand loves that place, and how beautifully they fit together.

A girlfriend from long ago once set me a task: find an object in your house, something you know well, and 'forget' what it is, look at it as if you've never seen it before. Explore it with a totally open mind. So I took a whisk out of the kitchen. I played music on its tines (and even ended up recording some of it!), I dipped it in ink and paint and made designs with it on paper, I cleaned it up and massaged parts of my body with it. I tried petting my cat with it (that did go over so well), and I took it outside and played in the dirt with it. I tried playing gongs and pot lids with it, I tried using it in the shower to stimulate my lymph glands. In short, I 'forgot' what it was to the best of my ability and reinvented my relationship with it (interestingly, I don't think it would ever have crossed my mind to whisk eggs with it if I didn't know that that's what it was designed for).

I am asking you to do the same thing, to the best of your ability, with your body: try to forget everything you 'know' about it, and discover it anew, reinvent your relationship with it.

​You may learn some interestingly specific things. For example, after our hands, faces, and genitals, our feet have the most nerve endings, yet we shod them in socks and shoes, walk on them all the time, callous them. Spending some intimate time with your feet may re-awaken that massive proprioceptive data flow highway to your brain; you may be amazed at how much raw sensation your feet can register.

But the larger, most important and overarching discovery won't be about one particular place. In fact, it won't be about anything in particular at all. Rather, it will be a slow accretion of self-acceptance, self-love, even self-wonder. You will appreciate this incredible body of yours, its incredible mobility and sensitivity (yes, I can deeply, reverently appreciate even my less-than optimally mobile and partly numb and sometimes pained body - it doesn't matter if you're a 20 year old yogini acrobat or a 90 year old in a wheelchair, your body is a miracle of mobility and sensibility!).

If you do this right, it can take 45 minutes or more. Try it once or twice a week for 6 weeks. yes, that's a lot of time away from House of Cards or the absurd election season - but it'll be worth it. Yes, you are worth it. But only you can stake that claim with the Universe: only your actions can proclaim, yes, I love and cre for myself. No one else can ever, ever give that to you.

Cherish your body, and the spirit that animates it - for without that spirit, there would be no 'you' to appreciate you. This practice, if done properly, will literally touch every square inch of your body that you can touch, but most of all, it will touch your heart as well.

I am struck, constantly, at how many people in the 'lightworker' community have grandiose titles *('Keeper of the Tablets of...', 'Divine Seer', 'Avatar', 'Celestial Shaman' etc.). This is often accompanied with some vaguely Indian-sounding name, ('Amajhzi' etc.).

I don't get it, frankly. I have a real streak of arrogance, in fact, some would say that by questioning or commenting on other people's self-titling, I'm being arrogant, and that's one way of looking at it. But for me, these baroque titles have a feeling of aggrandizement, bordering, at times, on parody. Where does this come from? Is it a need to stand out from the crowd? Is it borne of some lack of self-confidence that is ameliorated by the title? Is it really a heart-felt self-labeling and I'm just being a curmudgeon?

Often, these titles are doled out by Gurus, Swamis, and other teachers. Perhaps they are heart-felt, but to me, they often feel like part of a franchising operation: such and such a teacher from such and such a lineage (often there is no lineage, of course), gives you a title, and it's an imprimatur, a symbol of your successful 'graduation' from their course of study. It simultanously reinforces the teacher's 'brand' while also puffing up the recipient the way a graduate degree might.

Others simply describe who they are and what they do: 'Channel', 'Medical Intuitive', 'Psychic', 'Shaman' etc. Though I really don't like the word 'Channel', and I find the world chock full ​charlatans and con artists using this label, a well as the label of 'psychic' and 'shaman', these are descriptive words, not grandiose titles. I find that while they may not connote humility, neither do they reek of grandiosity, and so I have, grudgingly, adopted some of these descriptive terms for myself. I first learned of the term 'medical intuitive' only about 5 years ago, but I have been one all my life (often called a 'witch' as a child). I only heard of the terms 'energy healer', 'energy worker' and 'light worker' in the last decade, but these too, apply to me. And, while 'channel' and 'shaman' seem particularly loaded, I have reluctantly come to realize that I do channel in my work, though I do not give long, pontificating speeches on behalf of aliens or divine beings (some of these channels also seem to hawk the channel's very own CDs and courses too). I do ask questions while working with my clients, and I get answers, in words, images, and sometimes I just 'see' or 'know' or 'hear' things from their past and present.

I've also shied away from the term 'Shaman', but I've come to realize that I am indeed one. I like this definition of shaman, found on another, gifted and highly-trained shaman's website, that of Rebecca Singer:

A Shaman is someone who, either by birth and lineage, or serious illness, which acts as an initiation, gains the capacity to travel between the physical realm and the spiritual realm – the Spirit World. The process of moving between the worlds of earth and spirit is called journeying.

In most cases, the purpose of a Shamanic Journey is to gain information on another’s behalf… to assist with their healing process. When a Shaman travels to the spirit world, she or he will return with information regarding that person’s physical, emotional or spiritual health and well-being. With this information, the Shaman is able to guide the healing process using various practices and/or ceremonies.

I was either born with this ability, or learned it very, very early (having never been exposed to the concept of reincarnation, I told my mother at age two, in her words: "in my last life, I was an old Chinese man, and I knew everything, and I'm angry, because day by day, I am forgetting it all!"). I saw things other people didn't 'see' (the sex of a baby in a woman's belly, someone who was harboring cancer in their body). I spoke up about it, and eventually, I got in a lot of trouble for it, and shut my abilities down for the most part, rarely using them or even allowing myself to think about them. I also did 'energy healing work', including, to my skeptical first wife's amazement, quite successfully on my daughter, who was a toddler at the time. But I rarely let these gifts out; they had caused me much grief and misunderstanding in the past.

And, of course, I'd had quite striking experiences of detailed, specific prescience, throughout my entire life.

Then, at age 32, I suffered a horrendous injury that reopened these abilities - forced them open, blasted them out into the open. According to Rebecca's definition, I am a shaman, though I have no formal training, nor a lineage, and I am just really still in the process of uncovering what exactly this means for me, and for my clients.

As I say, I can be arrogant, egotistical, all the trappings of all-too-human, which is why I will never give myself a grandiose title, or some exotic-sounding name, and why I am uncomfortable labeling myself even as a 'channel' or 'shaman' or 'medical intuitive', though I believe myself to be all of those things.

I am a human of the male persuasion, who, at my best, co-creates healing and transformation with my clients, utilizing my senses, and information I gather from some other place - some place beyond intuition and experience, that Rebecca terms the 'spirit world', which is a label that makes as much or more sense to me as any other.

I've studied with, and been the client/patient of many healers. I've often been struck by how such different techniques, stemming from different models of physical, emotional and spiritual health, derived from utterly different belief systems, can all have efficacy, can all move one toward self-integration.

I will cover my belief system in detail in another post, but suffice it to say that it has often been directly contradictory to that of a healer who has been able to help me. We all filter reality through our own lens, from the most devout Christian or Muslim or Jew or Hindu to the most self-sure Atheist. Most of us had a belief system essentially gifted to us (some might say foisted upon us), that we have either accepted, or perhaps we've modified or even discarded as we've gone through life. We stick with what we were taught, or we alchemically mix it in with other things to derive a new system of beliefs, or perhaps we throw the whole thing out and adopt a different religion, or atheism, as we grow into ourselves.

The fact that this belief system, this version of reality that we hold to be 'true', or at least 'most accurate' in its conformance with what we've observed and/or want/need to believe, can utterly 'disagree' with that of the healer we're working with, yet we can derive a healing experience from their work, is something I am intensely curious about.

I've often tried to 'figure it out', as I do so many things, but the only conclusion I've come to (derived, of course, from my own system of beliefs) is that there is such a thing as karma, or perhaps, destiny, and that when we are brought into contact with someone who impacts on that destiny, resonates with it, is key to its next step, we can grow immensely with them, whether we accept their view of reality or not. And if we are both coming from the heart, or we can reach the heart-space together in our work, then we can both derive healing and growth from the experience. ​

This last weekend, I was invited down by Brooklyn/Manhattan-based chiropractor Susan Epstein to work with some of her patients.

I thought it might be quite a challenge taking on 4-5 new clients per day for a weekend, each session involving 90 minutes of intake and work. Although I was certainly aware that I'd worked hard at the end of each day, the two days streamed past almost effortlessly, as I got into a flow almost immediately. And, as has so often been the case of late, I also saw my work continuing to blossom out with new techniques, new insights, whole new ways of approaching structural, emotional, and spiritual issues.

The other thing I noticed was how profoundly the work opened my own heart. It is such heart-centered work, and I rarely reflect on its benefits for me as a practitioner, but of course, the effects are manifold.

This weekend was so heart-centered, that it blew open my own heart. As I left snowbound Brooklyn to come upstate, I drove along Atlantic Avenue, near the East River, through the neighborhood I grew up in. On a whim, I stopped at the lovely store my ex-wife runs there. I came in and swept her up in my arms, picking her up off the ground in a bear hug. There was nothing I wanted, no agenda, no 'reason' to even stop by. I just wanted to connect, to transmit a little love. We sat and talked for a couple of minutes, and then I headed home to my house, my land, and my lovely housemate, Sarah, the furriest Maine Coon cat I've ever known, and a brave soul herself, who has released many of her own fears and traumas to transform from a growly, grumpy, antisocial critter who could hardly stand human contact into a loving being who adores people and sleeps with me often.

My clients (including Sarah :-) continue to teach me, broaden me, challenge me, and delight me. Most of all, they lead me towards light and the heart, away from anger judgment and fear. Life is not a zero-sum game, not once you've evolved past the simplest level of survival and come into being in the world of spirit. Rather, it is win-win; when two hearts or more work together in concert for healing, all involved grow from the experience. All are healed.